Ralph struggled out of the brush with the branch he would use to lever his brother out of the muck. He paused. Where Jackson had been previously, a chest-arms-and-head shaped hole rapidly filled with marsh contents. The deep mud folded in on itself, collapsing inward, and Ralph watched it happen.
"What."
He took a step forward, paused, took another step. He swept the branch over the quivering tips of mud, as if expecting his brother to be invisible. He looked back and forth, over the marsh and into the woods. He had heard of stories in which people had exerted their bodies beyond their usual capacity (it was the entire basis for the tv show "The Incredible Hulk", and surprisingly, when he'd looked it up, turned out to have a significant degree of scientific evidence as backing). He didn't know the maximum capacity of an eleven year old boy, but he surmised it was enough to get out of the mud.
Ralph looked around for the heaviest mud trail leading away from the marsh, and chased it off into the underbrush.
After twenty yards, the mud trail disappeared, and Ralph stopped running. He sprinted back to the site of the showdown and looked for the next most obvious sign of a mud trail. He followed that until it ended, and returned once more. This continued for about fifteen minutes, until he found a trail that led all the way back to the Paradise.
He stopped, frustrated. This wasn't working. He needed either a different strategy, or a new train of thought. A different way of searching for where his brother had gone, or a different theory entirely for his location. Thinking through it for several minutes, Ralph came to the conclusion that either Jackson had become much sneakier than he had been an hour prior, and effectively disappeared taking all trace of travel with him, or he had drowned. Either way, he had to have gotten up first. He had gotten up, before doing whatever it was he had done.
Ralph concluded, stone-faced, that the most likely option was that his little brother had performed a Herculean feat of strength, pulling himself out of the marsh, only to wander dazedly back into it to drown, moments later. He knew that this was his fault. It was. He had been the one to throw the shovel at the very beginning. He had been the one to let Jackson attack Kyle. He had been the one to fail to stop Kyle from chasing Jackson. He had been the one to lose their trail after only two minutes of following. And he had been the one to run away when Jackson was being drawn into the muck.
He knew that he was in the wrong, repeatedly, and he knew that his actions were unforgivable. He'd killed someone and allowed his little bother to die. While he knew that his parents would accept him back into their lives, he wouldn't be able to fess up to what he'd done. It was too extreme, too great in magnitude. Ralph started shaking, trembling in the fear and anxiety of the moment, torn between two desires.
He decided eventually, ultimately, that his parents deserved to know what had happened to their youngest son, they deserved to know that he wouldn't be coming back home. Maybe he could go live with his grandparents? He and his uncle could get to know each other better then. Although, he thought, getting to know a man who had been addicted to essentially every substance known to man, and had been possessed didn't seem like the best of prospects to Ralph.
He took one last look around the around the Paradise he and his little brother had so painstakingly found and begun cultivating, relinquished it to the elements, and swore, "I will not be coming back."
As he ducked under the brush between the edge of the tree line and the road, Ralph realized he had been spattered with Kyle's refuse, his blood and fluids, along with specks of solid material that felt suspiciously like bone. He began sweeping his hands over his arms and legs in an effort to remove the most clear evidence of foul play, and began lightly jogging back home. Off in the distance, he thought he saw the B-brothers. 'I need to stop using Jackson's phrases.' He thought. That was the best way to get over trauma of this magnitude. Get over it fast, and move one. He started running to make it back home. He didn't want to put off the normalization even one second more than he had to.
He burst through the front door, shocking everybody as he ran past the kitchen/dining room on the way to the bathroom.
Slamming the bathroom door, he locked it shut and began drawing a bath. He flung open the medicine cabinet, snatched the matches that his mother kept in it, and lit the candle quartet on the sink. The four wicked candle lit and began greedily sucking for life, and Ralph proceeded to tear off his clothes. He laid them out on the floor and identified the most stained pieces, selecting the shorts, shoes, socks, and gloves.
His father began knocking heavily on the door, then queried, "Son? What's the matter? What happened? Why are you late again?" Ralph's father felt the need to not push too hard, but these questions were essential. He then noted the lack of brother. "Where's Jackson? Did he go over to Kris' house again?" He heard an intake of breath, sharp and ragged, and knew he must have hit on a sore spot. With growing apprehension, his voice lowered in tone, and he asked again, "Where is your brother, Ralph?"
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There was no response. Ralph's father began shaking. He was not a paranoid man. He never had been. But the way his son was acting was as if something had gone wrong. He heard a quiet sound, and identified it as sobbing. Scratch that. Something had gone wrong. Ralph never cries unless someone else gets hurt. It had been that way since he first started protecting his siblings. Form each other, from their 'friends', even from them, their parents.
He stepped back, half-turned and smashed the door down with his steel-toed boots. Ralph looked up, terrified. In his hands were a glove and the candle. He was in the process of burning to unrecognizable ash to the clothing he had been wearing previously, and had already finished with the socks and a glove.
The father stepped forward, one long stride, and took his sons' hands in his own. Ralph turned away, set the items on the toilet seat, turned back to his father, and threw himself into the comfort of those heavy, strong arms, wailing all the while.
Ralph had not felt pain this great. Ever. He chest was clenching up, his breaths came short, and when he breathed out, his whole body shook. He kept wailing, thrusting the anguish out of his body with all the force of breath he could muster. There is NOTHING like watching your own brother die. And that pales in comparison to leaving your own brother to die. 'This is how it is,' Ralph thought, screaming in acute agony. 'This is how it will always be.' The thought forced all other emotion from his mind, out of his heart. His wrenching emotions formed their ultimate crescendo, and ceased changing. 'I will be this person for forever.' Ralph's existence would remain shrouded in his misery, and nothing would be able to change that now.
Ralph's sisters and mother stood outside the bathroom too, waiting, timorously, hopefully, for whatever news his father could give them. The door to the brother's room opened, and a muddy blob peeked out. "What's wrong, Ralph?" his little brother asked. He looked pityingly at his father and asked again, "What's wrong with Ralph?"
Ralph heard the voice, and immediately felt something break within him. He pushed his family out of the way, ran to Jackson, and held him.
Dana and Lydia looked at each other questioningly, neither having a clue as to what had happened. Their mother shared a knowing look with their father, and they decided individually to have a long talk with the boys the next day.
The brother's father picked the two up, took them into their room, laid them on the upper bunk, and wrapped them each in a blanket.
"Go back to dinner, girls." He commanded. The girls scampered back to the table and continued eating, all the while perking their ears up for the slightest hint of information.
The parents stood in the hallway between the brothers' room and the bathroom, discussing quietly what they knew and what they guessed, so as not to interrupt the background sobbing.
"He was burning his clothes," the father started, "and there's mud and blood on him. Chips of bone, it looked like. Jackson's bed is entirely covered in mud, the water has washed onto the floor, and Ralph cried. Is crying." The mother responded with, "Jackson doesn't know what happened, but Ralph believes something did. They were hunting in the woods? Jackson decided he had enough? Ralph wanted to continue? Or vice versa. Jackson likes killing things, maybe? And they're both trying to hide it from us? Maybe Ralph is the coverer here. He always has been the protector, maybe he thinks that Jackson will change if that's truly what happened?"
"He's always been violent. The fighting, the pushing, the shoving." his father paused, then snapped his fingers. "And the window, what about that?. But each time, when I asked him why, he gave me an answer. An actual answer. Not an 'I don't know', or a 'because', but an actual answer. There was never joy in his words. He wasn't happy about the violence. It seemed necessary to him. A sort of restitution, if you will." She stared off into the middle distance, pursing her lips thoughtfully. "We definitely don't have the full story here. We need to ask them about it. Soon. Preferably without the other. We need to know if Jackson is developing any personality disorders. That's priority one right now."
He nodded, murmuring assent. "For now, let's leave them here. I'll call off work tomorrow, and we can make a big breakfast for the dinner they missed tonight. And let's gather the girls so we can read the Bible, and then everyone should go to bed early."
They did so, reading Proverbs 14 in the hallway junction between the bathroom, the girls room, and the boys room, and then sent the girls to sleep as well. The parents sang the children's favorite lullaby, and the household went to sleep.